9/11: a student elective in forensic pathology

New York on September 11 2001 - 1st Avenue looking towards Bellevue Hospital and Office of Chief Medical Examiner

(Copyright Richard Jones - All rights reserved)

That night, the work of the Office began in earnest, and I was assigned to one of four teams that were to identify the bodies of victims. In any disaster this is a vital part of the operation, since the pathological evidence of identity, coupled with investigations into clothing and possessions, provides grieving relatives with a degree of 'closure'. Clothing is searched for personal papers, credit cards, identity cards and so on; and, where there are no such papers, the investigation focuses on the colour, style, make and size of the clothes. Tattoos and jewellery also offer vital information, especially when there are inscriptions of any kind. Information recorded on the body itself includes hair colour, texture and style, eye colour, skin colour, scars and teeth; also, each body part was sampled for DNA profiling.

A medical student elective at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), New York City, in late August 2001 started quietly for me but, on a bright September morning, the calm of the OCME was shattered by events unfolding in South Manhattan.

I had been on call with forensic investigators over the course of 10th September to 11th September, attending a suspected suicidal shooting in the early hours of the morning. The autopsy started just before 0900 hrs and, during that examination, we were interrupted by a mortuary technician informing us that 'a plane had gone into the World Trade Centre'. We had heard of the historic crash of a plane into the Empire State Building and thought that this was something on a similar line to that crash.

Intrigued by the thought of being involved in something as historic as that event, I tried to find the investigator with whom I had spent the 'night-shift', with the intention of joining her at the World Trade Centre 'scene'; I was told that she had already left for the WTC site, and I was disappointed. That feeling was soon to turn to one of extreme relief when I heard that the first tower collapsed.

Watching the television, several of us saw the second tower collapse and we were horrified; the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Charles Hirsch, and my investigator colleague, were to have been setting up an 'advance' OCME staging-post at the site of the towers, and we were immediately concerned as to their safety. In due course, we discovered that they had indeed been caught in the collapse of the towers, and that they were both being treated in hospital for their injuries.

The enormity of the situation struck me then, and my UK medical student colleagues and I decided to try and contact relatives to let them know that we were safe. After a short time we were able to reach them on the telephone; they described a scene of chaos being broadcast live around the world and warned us to stay alert as there were reports of more 'unaccounted-for' planes.

We students spent the rest of the day attempting to offer our services to the NYU and Bellevue hospitals, on either side of the OCME building, but were told that we would not be required. Later that evening, we were to start a gruelling 2 1/2 weeks of 12 hour night-shifts at the OCME assisting in the pathological evidence gathering process, sorting through hundreds of body parts with the aim of establishing the identity of the deceased.

forensic pathology and art

Bullet Hole (1988) - Matt Collishaw

Professor Austin Gresham (1925-2009), a Home Office Pathologist based in Cambridge (UK), was said to have inspired the art of Matt Collishaw and Damien Hirst, amongst others, who made up the so-called Britart movement in the early 1990s.

In the early days I was just concerned with commanding imagery, hence Bullet... I wanted to punish the viewer - it was a way of getting their attention. But also I wanted to supply content that had a high level of ... what's the word ... images that demand a high level of social responsibility. Not things that you could look at in a lazy or uncommitted way.

I have knowledge of a doctor doing artificial respiration on a woman whose neck was still tightly constricted by a stocking, and of a police surgeon saying he could not say where blood streaming over the nose and mouth of a dead [man] came from - when closer examination would have revealed 3 bullet wounds in the head and 2 more in the back. Such errors are inexcusable for they arise from lack of care - just ordinary care - in carrying out the duties of a doctor called to see a person believed to be dead: in short, to examine it properly.